


A Moment of Clarity

by MJosephine10



Category: fixing on the hour - Fandom
Genre: Gen, because that is what you do for me!, i hope this brings you joy, this is for Emma's birthday
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-01
Updated: 2018-06-01
Packaged: 2019-05-16 20:02:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,651
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14817954
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MJosephine10/pseuds/MJosephine10
Summary: It is the evening before Darcy's 23rd birthday and Bing has a moment of clarity.





	A Moment of Clarity

**Author's Note:**

  * For [TolkienGirl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TolkienGirl/gifts).



Bing rocked back on her heels to take a deep breath and to survey her newly weeded garden. Her face glowed with energy and perspiration. She was not one of those people who can exert energy and not show it. She’d been weeding the rose border in her old Boston garden. It had been a while since anyone had tended to it so there had been a lot to do, but she had made good progress and she was satisfied with the pile of brown and grey weed roots that cluttered the lawn- evidence of her hard work and energy.

It was a clear night in late May, May 31st to be exact. The sun had just set but color and warmth still hung in the air and the first stars had started to appear in the folds of blues and pinks.

Darcy was in the garden too; she had been reading on the old stone bench that stood quietly in the middle of a colorful swath of nasturtiums, and columbines, hollyhocks, and other assorted blooming life. The book was closed now, set down on the bench beside her. Darcy was leaning forward slightly, head in one hand, gaze contemplative. She was wearing a cool grey dress and the fading light caught it so that she looked like a silvery iris stalk. Despite the relative warmth of the evening, she looked- Bing noted amusedly, watching from the garden border while wiping a combination of sweat and dirt from her glowing forehead- completely collected and cool.

“That is the most Darcy thing,” Bing thought to herself with an equal blend of delight and mischief. It was that very collected cool demeanor that had made her want to be friends with Darcy in the first place. On first meeting, she had wanted simultaneously to hug her and tease her, both impulses springing out of the same desire to draw out whatever was hiding underneath the composure. Not that Bing minded the coolness, the self-control, the walls, the ice, the front of cool air and composure that carried Darcy everywhere. She loved it and admired it with all the sincerity of someone who had never been able to hide her emotions a day in her life.

But she knew, instinctively, that she would not have loved her if the composure and the competence were all that there was to her. And their friendship so far had been a delightful and never-ending journey of discovering that Bing had been right, that the coolness was only the tip of the proverbial glacier that was Darcy’s personality. Except glacier wasn’t the word because Darcy contained fires in her and cool forests. (Bing’s train of thought halted here to laugh at her inability to ever contain Darcy to a consistent metaphor. She just would not be contained.) The point was, though, that in the end, Darcy’s coolness was the least cool thing about her. And right from the start she had been very, very cool. 

Bing put down her garden trowel and shook the dirt off her garden gloves. Crickets sounded in the distance, and they and other gentle buzzing noises of a spring night kept Bing company as she mused on the fact that her best friend was turning 23 tomorrow. And as she did, she had one of her illuminations about Darcy. Her moments of clarity.

( “Do you always call them that, Darcy had asked once? Or just when it has to do with me. It sounds as if you can see into my soul.”

“Oh I can, but only in brief moments. The rest of the time I’m just trying to see deeper in.”)  


In the present moment of Darcy clarity Bing was experiencing, she saw the thing that- if Darcy were a castle or a house, the metaphors again!- would be the foundation, the quality that was underneath the walls, the ice, and even the fire and the passion and the forests of her mind. A something that existed beyond and further down from even the pain and sensitivity that gave Darcy her specific color. She saw- and it made her catch her breath now the same way it had that first day she had met her and had felt it instinctively without knowing it at all- something both wistful and strangely, shatteringly pure.

And it was that that lay at the very root of Bing’s love for Darcy. The common rhetoric of their friendship now was that Bing saw the world through the lens of love and Darcy saw it through the lens of justice but the longer they knew each other, the closer both of those concepts had become intertwined, that love in a sense was justice and justice love. This was their friendship in a soundbite. But sometimes, sometimes in moments like these, Bing could see that often the thing that belongs to us is least ours and most found in the people we love. 

The truth was Darcy was pure in a way that Bing was not. Pure of heart. And Bing, pushing her curls out of her face and thoughtfully smudging dirt more deeply into her nose with the back of her hand, knew that this was true even as she heard Darcy’s (and extended family, friends, casual acquaintances) imagined but very believably real protests in her mind. 

“No, no”, she could hear them say. “Darcy is the cynical, jaded one; Bing is the pure one. Darcy, the cynical protects Bing the pure, not the other way around.”

(They wouldn’t say it exactly like that, but still.)

Bing knew this to be true, but she knew too that something else was true at the same time. And the something else was that Darcy’s deepest, truest self was pure and clear and true in a way that Bing wasn’t. She was pure like the most precious metals were pure, or the deepest lake, or- oh the blasted, inadequate metaphors!- but if she saw it she would know it and she could paint it.

And it was that purity in Darcy, purity in the sense of wholeness, that vibrated through her, illuminating her excellence, her wit, even her broken edges, her tragedy, her pride, her reserve so that she positively radiated. Most people shrunk from it, feared it, tried to fight it because no one wanted to be confronted with its terrible, steel-like quality (“terrible like a sword! No, no, stop it Bing”). But to the people who didn’t shrink, to the people who had the strength to withstand that kind of clarity, it was the brightest light. And that was what drew people to her as surely- more surely, Bing thought wryly- than Bing’s own easy kindness and friendliness.

And that was another thing, Bing thought as she pulled the weeds into a neater pile and collected her gardening tools. It was Darcy’s inner goodness- the purity of it, the color of it- that both buoyed up and deepened Bing’s easy kindness into something deeper and truer. 

Bing knew her heart was light and that love, most of the time, was easy for her. But she knew too of the cobwebs of hazy fear and laziness that could fill it and that, before Darcy, lurked more frequently and more powerfully than she knew how to admit. 

The true wonder of their friendship Bing was convinced she alone truly understood. It was not that Darcy had found Bing and in doing so had found someone to see beyond the edges and love the person underneath. Or at least not the only real wonder. The other real wonder, Bing thought, was that Bing had found Darcy and that in doing so had been able to confront those cobwebs and begin to clear them out. And in the empty spaces those created in her heart there had been room for love unlike any Bing had known before. It was love that didn’t just dance and sparkle on the surface but that filled her from the bottom of her heart. Before Darcy there had been only her family to love and the ache of a love that had nowhere to spend itself and so spent itself everywhere else. Now there was love that filled her and peace that steadied her and stillness that was full of more joy than restless movement ever brought.

Darcy wouldn’t know or understand it if she tried to say it to her, but it was true. 

They had always been two halves of a whole and the complementing notes in a song. (“No, that’s not right. Darcy’s a whole symphony.”) But in addition to their natural back and forth and finishing each other’s thoughts and rounding out each other’s perspectives with their own complementing ones, Bing was so grateful for the final piece of the love and wholeness that most people couldn’t see. Bing knew that in the very depths of her soul she had been afraid but that being friends with Darcy had made her able to be brave in spite of it. And that knowledge filled Bing’s heart to overflowing more than she knew how to articulate or express. 

Bing sat with her hand pressed to heart, weeds and tools returned to the garden, uncharacteristically still as she felt her heart begin to overflow. The natural and usual result of one of her moments of clarity. 

“I should paint her a picture,” Bing thought. “And tell her that way. Or write her a poem of extended mixed metaphors. Or.” She had another idea, a better one.

With a laugh of excited glee, Bing gathered her tools up her in arms and set off across the garden to go join Darcy on the other half of the garden bench.

Expressing the inexpressible in a way appropriate for the occasion of Darcy’s birthday would have to wait until she’d talked her into coming with her to go buy ice-cream.

**Author's Note:**

> Happy, happy birthday Emma!! It's hard to put what our friendship means to me in words but I'm becoming quite attached to the tradition of trying to do so through the lens of these two girls. They are so dear to me now, in themselves, and for the gifts- both of your friendship and your writing- that they have given me! I hope you like it! Love, Maria aka Bing


End file.
